


Unsung Heroes

by BobRussellFan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: AU, FixitFic, Sort Of, this is a nice one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:07:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23832142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BobRussellFan/pseuds/BobRussellFan
Summary: A few years after the end of the Clone Wars, Ahsoka Tano takes Luke and Leia out on the streets of Coruscant.
Kudos: 22





	Unsung Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> This idea has been with me since I saw the relevant Season 2 episodes.
> 
> Leave your comments below!

Unsung Heroes 

Ahsoka Tano had found that being an aunt combined the best of both worlds, most of the time. She got to spend time with two cute kids who doted on her like a second mother, buy them treats when they were sad or take them racing when they were bored, and hand them off to their parents when they were feeling cross. Most of the time. “Hey, watch it, you two!” Away from the usual security, Luke and Leia were fast as greased Wookies - and she couldn’t exactly chase them down with the Force. Not unless she wanted all three of them on the newsnet, again! So she chased after the twins, slipping her way through the crowds of families, clones, and various sentients there to commemorate a solemn occasion. 

At least they liked to stick together. She found them in front of a sweet vendor, where Leia’s big eyes and winning smile had won them both frozen treats. Well, almost won. “Hey, you’re going to have to pay for that!” With an air of injured dignity, feeling older than a Togrutan in her late twenties had any right to be, Ahsoka paid the Toydarian behind the counter and turned on the twins, her arms crossed in her best “stern parent” mode. “Well? What do you have to say for yourselves?” 

“Sorry, ‘Soka,” said Luke around a mouthful of frozen dairy, looking like quite the little penitent. “Just got hungry,” he added in a tone so pitiful that Ahsoka actually laughed. 

“You’re always hungry,” she said truthfully, ruffling his mop of brown hair. “Just stick close to me, I don’t want to lose you in this crowd.” There was indeed quite a crowd in the Plaza today - though not as many as there would be later in the year, on Chancellor’s Day. That would be a day for dark clothes and solemnity, but not today. With treats in hand, they made their way to the center of the Plaza - where, five times life-size, there towered the figure of the great man who had given his life to bring peace to the Galaxy - and who had died only a few months before it had finally come. Sheev Palpatine. 

“Were you there?” asked Leia, a little while later. She’d turned from what in Ahsoka’s opinion was a rather melodramatic display depicting Palpatine’s last days to look up at her guardian with curious eyes. It wasn’t that Leia was _smarter_ than Luke, necessarily - just better at paying attention. For his part, Luke was busy miming lightsaber strokes with a stick he’d found underneath a blue-leafed ornamental tree. 

“No, I was teaching younglings when it all happened,” she said simply, remembering what had at the time seemed like the greatest tragedy she could imagine - not just because of what had been lost, but how it had happened. “I never even left the creche. By the time I knew anything had happened, your father and Uncle Ben-” Referencing the newly-minted head of the Jedi Council as “uncle” in public wasn’t wise if you were trying to avoid the holos. “Were calling me with the news about the-” 

“The SITH Beast!” declared Luke, waving his stick around impressively. “If I’d been there, I’d have cut it to pieces!” The fact that he hadn’t yet hit himself in the eye was a testimony to the boy’s innate Force sensitivity, and Ahsoka did reach down to direct him away from a Rodian about his age before he hit him in the face in his excitement. 

“People tried that, little one,” she said quietly, remembering the look of shock on Obi-Wan’s face, the look of grief on Anakin’s, and how terribly unfair it had all seemed. 

“But Sith aren’t beasts,” said Leia thoughtfully, hands in her pockets as she looked up at Ahsoka. “They are very bad, but they’re crafty. We have to use our brains to beat them.” 

“That’s true,” conceded Ahsoka, thinking of the last time she’d fought Darth Ventress on Exegol. In the pilot’s jumpsuit that hid her stomach, nobody could see the lightsaber scar on her lower abdomen. “The Zillo Beast was influenced by the Sith, but it couldn’t have been Sith itself.” 

“How do you know?” asked Leia, looking up at her curiously. Ahsoka shrugged, wondering if it was just going to be her and the kids all afternoon. “How do you know the Sith influenced it?” 

“Remember the story?” she asked, not unkindly. She pointed at the holo images of Palpatine’s last day. “The Beast escaped from captivity and made its way straight for the old Chancellor’s Office, where it - “ 

“Ate him!” Luke bounced up and down, and Ahsoka reminded herself to have a talk with Padme about what Luke was watching on the Holonet these days. Leia thumped her brother on the arm, and he thumped her back, and Ahsoka stepped in to keep the kids apart again. 

“Hey! Hey! No fighting, you two, I mean it.” They found a bench, and she parked the kids on opposite sides of her, checking the time once again. She thought to herself how this was just history to Luke and Leia - something that had happened twelve years ago and a good two years before their births. “It must have used Force Lightning,” she added before she could mention how the late Chancellor had by all accounts been crushed to death. “There were marks of it everywhere in the office. But it must not have known how to use it well, because when the clones finally brought it down, the Beast itself was burned inside and out. That’s why we think it must have been controlled by Tyrannus.” 

“Dark power always destroys itself,” said Leia, nodding seriously - as serious as you could look when eating frozen dairy, anyway. “And then what happened?” 

She hemmed and hawed awkwardly. “Your parents decided that life was too short, and they were going to tell the galaxy they loved each other whatever happened, and after that a lot of things started changing…” She was saved from explaining the last decade of Galactic history to a ten year old by a call on her holo from Padme Amidala, thank the Force. She smiled brightly at Padme, who had thoughtfully dressed down enough for the call that no one was likely to realize Luke and Leia were talking to the former Chancellor of the Galactic Republic, and watched Luke and Leia compete to tell their mother about all their adventures that day, with Luke’s somewhat exaggerated tales of his exploits making Padme laugh affectionately before the kids handed the holo back to her. 

“Are my little terrors behaving themselves?” she asked. 

“Oh, everything’s fine here,” she said warmly, “we’re in the plaza and they’re having snacks. We’re going to meet you-know-who a little later…”

“Well, I won’t keep you two apart. Take care of the twos,” she said, and left Ahsoka with the kids. 

-

“But Chancellor Palpatine wasn’t Force-sensitive, right?” asked Leia, earning a nod of confirmation from Ahsoka. “So why can I feel him?” she added the last in a whisper. She’d always had a bit more discretion than Luke, who had returned to stick-fighting with that Rodian boy. 

“Scenes of great tragedy can leave a lasting mark on the Force. I know your father had told you about Tatoonie.” Anakin didn’t see the kids as much as he liked these days - but then his work for the Republic, hunting Grievous and his droid hordes on the Outer Rim, kept him busy. Maybe that was for the best. Ahsoka knew he had taken the divorce badly... 

Thinking about that hurt _her_ too much, much less the kids, so she changed the subject. “And Palpatine collected Force artifacts and holocrons. That was actually how Master Windu finally defeated Tyrannus, when he came to Coruscant to try and steal powerful artifacts from the Chancellor’s collection. So something may have left behind a powerful signature that we read as his.” There was a statue of Windu in front of the Jedi Temple about the size of this one - the Jedi hero who’d died defeating the Sith Lord whose tyranny had begun the Clone Wars. How would Master Windu feel about the new Order that Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Anakin had forged out of the old? She liked to think he'd have approved.

He'd certainly approved of his death, meeting Tyrannus in battle with a smile on his face and striking him dead with his last breath as the whole Galaxy watched. Tyrannus had died for nothing, ultimately - Anakin had told Ahsoka later that the Chancellor’s personal library had been burned almost entirely to ashes during the Sith Beast’s attack on Palpatine. The only thing that had survived was a wall frieze that now hung in Anakin’s quarters on his personal flagship. Maybe that made Palpatine’s death sting a little less, she mused- 

“Surprise!” She jumped in her seat, not quite going for the lightsaber at her hip, as she felt a familiar Force presence announce itself behind her just after the words reached her ears.

“Barriss!” She shot an annoyed glance up at Barriss, though it was hard to look too angry with the children laughing uproariously at her. “You took five years off my life just now!” 

“Oh. don’t be such an old woman! You’ve got to stop being so easy to sneak up on.” Barriss wrapped her arms around Ahsoka and kissed her still half-sulking wife on the cheek, then smiled at the kids. “Is Aunt Ahsoka boring you with tales of the grand past?” 

“Yes,” said Luke, the little scamp, “and it was _awful!_” 

Laughing, Barriss sat down on the bench, still wearing her medical scrubs. Her hand on Ahsoka's, she offered a feeling of apology if she'd _really_ hurt anything - Ahsoka had to admit it had just been her pride, though she'd get Barriss back _later_, thank you... 

“Oh, you poor children.” They looked up together at the statue of Chancellor Palpatine, the four Force-sensitives feeling the faint tinge of regret and unfinished business that came with the sight of his face, and then looked away. “Don’t you know you should think about the future?”


End file.
